Mission Control for 3ds Max

The first and only spreadsheet editor for 3ds Max

What is Mission Control?

Mission Control is the first fully featured spreadsheet editor for 3ds Max. It allows users to view and edit any element within a scene in an efficient, compact and customisable UI. Built on top of this core is a suite of tools that offer unparalleled workflow enhancements. Make no mistake, Mission Control is far more than a simple spreadsheet.

View the parameters of almost any aspect of your scene:-

objects

materials

texture-maps

cameras

lights

spacewarp modifiers

modifiers.

Save time by accessing any parameter of any object in three easy steps :-

Choose a object/class.

Select the parameters you wish to view.

View and edit the parameters of any instance of the chosen object/class in the spreadsheet view.

Paste from the paste-bin as simple copy or as instances (where applicable)

Why was Mission Control developed?

Mission Control was born out of the frustrations of not being able to achieve certain things in 3ds Max without either writing custom Maxscripts, or laboriously repeating a task on multiple objects. It seemed crazy that there were no inbuilt methods to do many of the tedious tasks that no doubt you are painfully all to aware of.

Mission Control started off as a repurposing of 3ds Max’s built in tool, the ‘light-lister’, to list materials instead. Although this was largely successful, it suffered from a number of limitations inherited from its predecessor, the light-lister; you were limited to a maximum of around 150 items (and remarkably, it still is today). Secondly, it was painfully slow to refresh the maxscript-based UI.

A number of max releases later and the introduction of dotnet it became apparent that it would be possible to not only construct a more functional and performant UI, but with this performance boost, it would become feasible for the ‘lister’ to view and edit any max object and its properties… and so Mission Control the spreadsheet editor for 3DS Max was born!

Who will benefit from Mission Control?

Mission Control offers a wide range of benefits to all disciplines and industries that use 3ds Max. Whether you are an Architect, engineer, illustrator, VFX artist, generalist, modeller, animator or lighter, Mission Control will streamline workflows, help solve technical challenges and find bugs; saving you time and money.

Architectural Illustrators

Speed up every aspect of your workflow by directly accessing the parameters you wish to edit. No need to wait for UIs to open or to waste time searching for parameters in dialogs, rollouts and the command panel.

Get rid of pesky selection delay; in heavy scenes 3ds max can experience serious delays when changing selection. For many operations, this can become a major productivity issue. Mission Control stores everything you need to edit your scene in memory providing instance access to parameters without causing those frustrating delays when changing your selection.

Save time debugging scenes. In complex scenes and assets received from third-parties, finding the cause of a problem can be a time consuming and frustrating task. With Mission Control, you can see an overview of your scene, listing every class of object, modifier, texure-map, material, etc helping you to quickly identify rogue elements, or uneccessary complex shader trees. Easily find parameters that have values that affect scene performance.

Speed up look development by viewing all your material, texture-map, light or camera parameters in one view.

Add intelligence to complex scenes by instancing shared parameters. Creating parameter instances has never been easier now that Mission Control allows you to copy a controller and paste it across multiple objects with a single click.